Weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems may be used to estimate the overall weight of a moving vehicle (or a vehicle that is not moving). WIM systems typically employ a sensor pad system that is deployed in a roadway, and vehicles are weighed as they drive over the sensor pad system. Besides the overall weight, it is often desirable to measure such characteristics of a vehicle as the weight that individual tires impose on the roadway, the speed profile of the vehicle, the individual axle weights, the distance between axles, and the lateral and the longitudinal center of balance of the vehicle. Such information may be useful, for example, to load and balance an aircraft prior to take-off. Such characteristics are also useful to commercial vehicle law enforcement officers to quickly and accurately determine the individual axle weights for highway safety. Industry may use WIM systems to determine the tare weight on incoming (or outgoing) vehicles and to determine the load weight as the vehicle exits (or enters) a facility, thus quickly and accurately determining the weight of product delivered to (or taken from) the facility. Various automated features may be included in WIM systems to improve the accuracy of the weighing process by reducing personnel hours and the time required for deployment and by eliminating opportunities for human errors from the manual transfer of data or from the miscalculation of vehicle attributes.
Oftentimes it is desirable to move a WIM system between multiple locations. However portable WIM systems often encounter such problems as inaccurate positioning of WIM pads during installation, migration of pads as the system is used, deformation of the roadway surface as the system is used. For these and other reasons improvements are needed in portable WIM systems.